Recent content by freefrog

Yes and passive pickups have never been ideal: they are basically resonant filters, tuned by coil inductance and overall capacitance. Guitar amps are voiced to compensate that. So the apparently flatter response of the Area in my "raw" measurement is not necessarily a bonus when the pickup is...

Below is the raw electrically induced response of a DM Area VS a traditional bridge Strat PU, on a linear scale. Vertical steps of 3dB. :-)

The interference will be less problematic if you wire Eldred mod first (4.7nF from hot to ground) THEN bass cut cap in series. But it will/would potentially give a really narrow frequency response, FWIW. I'd experiment with cap values before to opt for that definitively. :-)

BTW, a good way to compare passive pickups is to evaluate their harmonic richness. Pluck consistently a normally tuned high E string @ the 19th or 20th fret. It should produce a frequency around 1khz. Record it direct to the board. Then count the harmonics. Weither they are single coils or...

What such hot Strat PU's have in common with P90's is the inductance. But coil geometry, Q factor and shape of magnetic field are not there, of course. :-) As a general side note to my new rambling about cable capacitance and inductance : the thing with classic Strat pickups is exactly the...

As high capacitance cables also tend to increase the Q factor of passive pickups, the Super D through a coily or super long / highly capacitive cable should sound super cocked wah... In fact, that's what I used around 1981 (a Super D bridge in a guitar, a Dual Sound neck in another one) and I...

In Area's, signal coil and bottom noise cancelling bobbin are asymetrical. This mismatching causes a comb filtering effect present with most stack pickups but in this case, unpleasingly focused in the high harmonics. DiMarzio has tried to minimize this side effect by using a shield between coils...

Well, it was a simple question of height and tone settings, so. Glad for you if it works... The good thing being that a simple capacitor in series suffices to emulate the related tone. ;-)...

If the tone cap is of standard value and the tone pot correctly wired, this behaviour is typical of a damaged wiring or pickup. The simplest way to check if it's the case is to measure the DCR of the JB Jr: if it shows no reading or an incredibly high value, something in the signal path is...

To repeat my usual stance in such cases: the sound of any passive pickup is largely defined by external factors. *Differences due to pot values: *Differences due to cable capacitance (itself due to the length of wire between pickup and the first buffered input): *Simple trick to emulate...

That's 470 or 560 KILO Ohm. A 470k resistor in parallel with a 500k pot changes it virtually in a 242.26k pot. A 560k resistor sets its resistance to 264.15k. The pickup "sees" these resistive loads and behaves more or less as if it had a 250k pot. There's a difference of "taper": a...

Yes, N & B PU's can be voiced for their respective positions but again, it's not a necessity and it has nothing to do with price. The Burstbucker 61's mentioned in my previous post had exactly the same measured resonant peaks, FWIW. And a set of Duncan SSL1 single coils includes three identical...

Yes it might be half decent and even decent or great: albeit quality is random with such products, some knockoffs are really good sounding. But no, it's not "definitively" a bridge pickup: 8.1k is the DCR expected from 5000 turns of average 42AWG per P.A.F.ish bobbin. This is the basic recipe...

BTW: I'd try first the bridge PU with the 500k volume but also with the tone control disconnected (or changed in a no load pot. it's easy to do, even from a normal pot. More on that on request if needed). If necessary, the single coils can still receive 470k resistors between their hot and...

Yep, trembuckers do a small difference in measured specs and tone. But negligible.